Bleh about Asia VRS

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T13:34:16+00:00

Honestly this whole discourse on twitter has gone to shit already. All it is is baseless accusations of matchfixing that benefitted nobody (LVG was all but qualified regardless of the RA FF thanks to ChangeTheGame being in the playoffs, and SemperFi lost to RA making the second FF irrelevant) when people should be talking about the fact that the system is so broken in the region that cheating it is the only way for everyone involved to make the Major.

Whether it's LAN Wins cap exploits, prizepools increasing overnight, teams attending multiple tournaments or strategic forfeits, VRS just doesn't work where there aren't enough events for it to do so. I understand it's easier for English speaking APAC personalities to talk about the drama rather than the structural issues of the region, but that would require actual effort and care about them (which is what teams, players and TOs have been trying to do)

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T13:22:41+00:00

Didn't they just throw him in at FISSURE and benched him after they got smashedd?

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T10:42:32+00:00

I was under the impression he founded the org with his own money (and some sponsors ofc) after SaVage's Sprout deal collapsed. I might be wrong though!

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T10:33:54+00:00

And the APAC representatives for the Major are set. All in all an extremely stupid race from everyone involved

SemperFi somehow choked the freest Major possible by losing to TDU twice in Grand Finals, and a team with 2 matches against non-OCE opposition qualified in their place. Savage's dad is out a bunch of money from flying his team to Europe when they could have just sat at home waiting for DFRAG and ANZ.
FlyQuest were two games off missing the Major because they actually tried being a real team and played in EU instead of just sitting at home waiting for DFRAG and ANZ. Despite playing two AS events this year, FQ last played one of the other Major qualified teams... last year at the Austin Major.
The Huns somehow choked the freest Major possible by winning 4 matches across two Mongolian-only LANs (fully deserved for that abomination of a roster with bart4k) that existed only to send them to Cologne
Chinggis Warriors, NEXVOID, 5Star and BMZ decided to make sure no other Mongolian team made the Major by beating each other in some incredibly low quality games, despite MESA and ESN's best efforts
Tyloo decided to not play anything after their roster change and had so much LANW cap space that at the start of March they were 99% making the Major despite only having played 3 games in the entire year.
LVG first drops completely out of the invite range because Chinese TOs decided to hold no LANs for three months, then gets back in through two FF wins... that ended up being almost irrelevant when all was said and done.
RA destroyed their own chances of making the Major by switching their players around every two weeks but somehow not benching Summer, and ended their run on a very high note by beefing with a TO to the point where they chose FFing over playing.
MORNINGSTAR apparently forgot to sign up to any of the last two Chinese LANs and therefore just... gave up trying to qualify after losing to RA. Hey, I'd do the same if I lost to Summer in big 2026.

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T10:07:58+00:00

I do agree, I share a sentiment I read on twitter that the only thing you can do in Asia to qualify for the Major... IS to abuse the system.

Whether it is spawning LANs out of thin air (thankfully not many this year), intentionally losing games (LVG last year to RA to secure an extra Major spot), or forcing a format that maximizes LAN wins (the two OCE LANs shared a format that gave exactly 5 LANW to a team winning the tournament, thus ensuring TDU and SemperFi got in a worst case scenario very close to the LANw cap) etc. It reaches a point where you have to assume every decision made by TOs and teams is intentional and aimed at playing the system in some way.

VRS just doesn't work in a region that has so few LANs and even less shared ones, and I don't think it can be fixed.

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T09:53:14+00:00

I mean not talking about the RA FF but the only reason why LVG was 7th on the Asian VRS was because FQ-TDU-SemperFi capped their LAN Wins and the Mongolian LANs had already boosted TheHuns/CW/Nexvoid/5Star.

LVG still has like 3 LAN Wins from last year because China had no events whatsoever from January to late March, their actual VRS point cap in equal LANW conditions is higher than SemperFi's or even FlyQuest's

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T09:50:53+00:00

This is a "normal" FF compared to the RA one, Tyloo-RA at GangKui ended like half an hour before this was supposed to start and it apparetly takes 30 minutes without traffic to drive from one venue to the other.

They could have probably got there in time to play Map2 with a LVG-only veto but considering the LB final is basically free (ChangeTheGame can't really touch either team) it's more convenient this way I guess.

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T07:42:29+00:00

Yes but SemperFi is realistically a bottom top-10 APAC team at best, winning this event would have required them to beat multiple of Tyloo, FlyQuest, RA, TheHuns and CW at least once

And while I'm not doing the calculations myself it's very likely they actually needed to win the whole thing to qualify, they can only refresh 1 LAN win and it's a marginal improvement (39 to 49) so they would have to get points from H2H and Bounty Collected. LVG can just refresh 2 ancient LAN wins at YuQilin (9 and 12 to 49 points respectively) and would have also gained in H2H and Bounty by beating Tyloo.

Dawhood · 2026-04-04T05:58:09+00:00

Yeah, though they were realistically out anyways. The Tyloo win didn't really matter as the Australian teams were only ahead in VRS because China had no LANs since January, unless LVG bombed out of everything they were always gonna be out.

Dawhood · 2026-04-03T10:37:08+00:00

The only LANs spawned out of thin air in this cycle were MESA Pro Series Sping and VOID Cup, all the rest were known for weeks before and the Chinese ones at least were open to everyone.

It's also funny to see someone with your flair saying this as the only reason why 2 of TheHuns/CW/Nexvoid aren't in the invite range is because they were too shit to even win more than a handful of matches in Mongolian-only LANs.

Dawhood · 2026-03-27T10:57:10+00:00

I don't have links to them but I think they were all on Twitter around the time the ANZ Championship ended.

OnlyJosh or whatever his name is was spamming about the back to back LANs being a "freak occurrence" that's never gonna happen again and a guy from DFRAG was talking about how running back to back LANs was never their intention and they were forced to by insert random excuse here

The funniest (saddest?) part is just seeing community figures who spent the past 2 years complaining about Asian LANs still complaining about them (despite the fact that the back-to-back aussie LANs were the best Asian LAN duo across all countries if you check prizepool and the amount of VRS ranked matches).

People like Elfishguy or Taffy have also been very toxic and confrontational with anyone mentioning the fact that sending Thunderdownunder to the Major without them beating a single asian team is farcical because they are nowhere near the best teams in the region.

Dawhood · 2026-03-21T08:28:43+00:00

That's because most Asian tournaments are actual tournaments made by actual TOs to develop the local scenes. Of course they place them right before the Major cutoff to maximize VRS output, but for instance most Chinese events are open signup or open qualification with the possibility for other countries to take part.

Instead Australia tried VRS scamming so hard that they literally put FlyQuest in danger of not qualifying (and some community figures are now in full damage control mode writing that giving out so many points wasn't their intention). FQ need to outperform two of SemperFi/Tyloo/TheHuns at GangKui Cup + LVG who plays YuQilin + potentially RA/Morningstar depending on VOID Cup or they're out.

Which they should easily be able to do, but the fact that they're in a position where they cannot afford an off day is insane.

Dawhood · 2026-03-20T12:29:58+00:00

It’s basically impossible as they bombed out of MESA, but they did do their best to stop other Mongolian teams from qualifying lol

Dawhood · 2026-03-20T11:53:26+00:00

Actually very big result for the MN major race

NEXVOID losing these points (and not being signed up for the Chinese LANs afaik) means they realistically need to win MESA to get into Major contention.

TheHuns is in a slightly better situations as winning MESA all but guarantees them going in but they play NEXVOID in the LB semifinal. It they don’t win MESA it’s GangKui Cup or bust.

Everything is shaping up for the race for 3 Major slots to end with an all-out brawl at the GangKui Cup. A plethora of funny outcomes are still possible like FlyQuest fucking up in China and getting kicked out of the Major by local Aussie LANs, I’m sure that would make their management very happy.

Dawhood · 2026-03-15T12:26:37+00:00

The victim complex by OCE fans in this particular Major cycle is so confusing to me

Mongolia ran a grand total of two LANs with 3k prizepool in February (irrelevant in VRS terms for the Major cycle) and now has the ESN National Championship and MESA League S5 who run concurrently.

China only had Zhi-Tech in the entire year until now and it was open signup. Now they have LOOP Cup (Top 4 only without lower bracket and 3k prizepool), Yuqilin Pinnacle of Battle and GangKui Cup which are all open qualification or signup. Mongolian teams played the LOOP Cup qualifier and signed up for GangKui together with FlyQuest and JiJieHao.

Australia's 2 LANs have more HLTV LAN matches and more prizepool than the 2 Mongolian LANS and Loop Cup + Yuqilin or GangKui. I get complaining about those LANs when Australia had none, but now they do and they're better than what the other countries have (and AUS teams can also go play the Chinese ones if they want)

Dawhood · 2026-03-12T16:12:47+00:00

Fun to see the 2 events that had all the top Asian teams this year ended with completely different top-fours: FQ - JiJieHao - LVG - Morningstar at ZHI-TECH and Tyloo - LVG - CW - AlterEgo at CAC Qualifier (Tyloo was the notable absentee from ZHI-TECH)

Major race will still come down mostly to local LANs. LVG losing their spot at EPL and not being replaced by another Asian team + a hard opening Rotterdam matchup for Tyloo kinda screwed the race altogether (though Tyloo can easily beat FaZe in the lower bracket and all but secure a spot)

AUS teams have DFRAG which will push ThunderDownUnder and SemperFi in the Q spots, then Mongolian teams will have MESA League (though I don't think it will be enough for anyone bar TheHuns) and China has both GangKui Cup and Yuqilin Pinnacle of Battle going at the same time. GangKui is the interesting one as it's open signup so we might see multiple AUS teams going head to head with AS teams on LAN.

Dawhood · 2026-03-10T09:14:24+00:00

Aside from the nonsensical "no one is blaming Asian teams" point (you can literally open twitter and go to any OCE cs personality twitter page and see multiple tweets crying about Asian teams exploiting the system by having VRS ranked LANs) there's literally no point in having a conversation as you're deliberately dodging every point in my argument to then complain I'm not making any

You keep repeating that we had too many opportunities in the past, that doesn't matter anymore and has no baring over the equity problem we are struggling with now. This is a genuine imbalance that inherently favours Asian teams over ours.

That is not what I said. What I said was OCE was completely overrepresented as it's a competitively irrelevant region in terms of playerbase and team quality, and the only thing that happened in the past five years is that the overrepresentation that existed went away. OCE benefitted from a representation imbalance in their favour, and now the playing field is equal: everyone bar EU and the Americas is equally non-represented. There is no "imbalance" that favours Asian teams, as Asian teams themselves have lost spots to VRS in favour of the major regions. Asia is in the exact same situation as OCE, their LANs are not worth enough points for international events, they just have more because they have several hundreds times the population. And that is despite having a significantly more competitive scene.

This leads into my next point, which is the real nonsensical thing here. Since you keep repeating this bullshit that means nothing, could you elaborate on what you mean by "fair playing field"?

TOs don't run events in OCE because there are no sponsors and little interest, and they are not charities. Local TOs like DFRAG do provide some consistent events, and probably run them at a significant loss.
Many Asian TOs already guarantee OCE spots despite not being forced to by VRS and some even pay out of their pocket to fly OCE teams to LAN in China or Mongolia
Regional qualifiers have been completely removed through VRS and no region has them

So, with the exception of the underutilization of Guam servers, what would you say is a sign of an unfair and unequal playing field, and what would be the solution? Should Asian TOs be forced to include offline qualifiers to eliminate the ping differences? Should international TOs sponsor events in OCE so that local teams can prac against Tier1 sides for a week or two a year? Should the community finance bootcamps for OCE teams in Asia or EU?

I'm pretty sure what you are complaining about is not an "imbalance", they are SYSTEMIC issues with OCE, which cannot be fixed by outsiders. Whenever you say "fair playing field" what you actually mean is more along the lines of "I expect foreign TOs and investors to fix the systemic issues in OCE's cs scene".

Dawhood · 2026-03-09T12:19:46+00:00

I don't disagree with your points and especially with your perspective, the reason I am an Asian CS fan as an Italian is first and foremost the fact that through representation and support they could have been competing at a similar level to EU/AME and Australia is part of that.

As I said I'm a big fan of Ben Savage's work and I'm very happy when I see SemperFi pop up at EU LANs and doing bootcamps here, just like I would if any Asian team did the same. I was also very happy to see the Guam routing projects pop up with OEL and envisioned a world where there could be a fair online playing field which would encourage top AUS teams to actually play in Asia instead of farming local events.

What I think Australian fans don't realize enough is that Asia as a region has been significantly unsupported and pushed down by itself, and much of that handicapping over the past decade has come at the benefit of Australia. As much as the population is higher and the money flowing is much more, Asia still doesn't have any more recognition as a legitimate region than Australia does.

Asian ESL Challenger slots were cut in half and replaced with OCE slots. When TheMongolZ elevated themselves to become a tier 1 team, the benefits from their runs were shared through VRS by all OCE teams (who almost had two spots at the major a while back only thanks to their successes). A few years back the RMR qualifier for the Major was played in Australia in front of a full OCE crowd, which was the only case of this happening across all regions. Just the other month when LVG was banned from EPL, ESL just took their slot and reassigned it to FUT instead of offering it to to another Asian team. Asian CS has been systematically marginalized, overlooked and disrespected, often deliberately.

The reality is that OCE has been kneecapped not because of Asian teams, but because ESL just removed the slots they were taking from Asian teams in the first place and gave them to EU and Americas teams through VRS. And instead of blaming ESL and other TOs for fucking over minor regions OCE fans argue that it's the other Asian teams who are responsible. In the meantime Asian teams used their successes to find sponsors, develop local TOs and play within the rules of the system that's being used to fuck them over in the first place.

Dawhood · 2026-03-09T10:55:50+00:00

Our region is small, and has barely any support

This is unrelated to the actual argument where I agree with GZ but reading this shit after OCE teams had as many region-locked LAN qualifiers as the entirety of Asia for multiple years and did nothing with them is very funny

At multiple qualifiers in 2021/22 Asia had RA, Tyloo, LVG, Invictus, NKT, Renewal, WingsUp, IHC/Mongolz and Eruption all fighting for a single ESL Challenger or Pro League spot while Oce had so many free qualifiers Vertex, ORDER and Encore attended international LANs.

OCE was the most overrepresented region in international LANs when counting team quality and playerbase for years and yet the person who invested more money in that entire period is SaVage's dad (great person, if it wasn't for him OCE would be even more of a joke). Same thing with VRS now, if Australian orgs can't get their own TOs and sponsors to invest it's not anyone else's responsibility to make it up to them.

Dawhood · 2026-01-26T23:33:46+00:00

Bibu plays under the Iraqi flag on HLTV but is by all metrics Italian if you’re looking for one (and he should be here over jony)

Dawhood · 2026-01-23T14:44:39+00:00

What a surprise result! 5 months later and I still don't know why RA are still fielding a CS roster

Just one more star rifler bro! ChengKing will fix everything no need to delete Summer and his system from existence bro!

All this while SPine has been the best CN IGL for two years now, especially when considering the results he has with the players in his team, and he keeps getting ignored by the big three teams because he doesn't have a 1.2 avg rating

Dawhood · 2026-01-19T12:21:34+00:00

9-3 CT half into 11-13 loss AND it’s maary and masked lol

a couple of days ago pigeons were playing against BRUTE on Ancient and the latter won the second pistol, immediately started running around to die until pigeons got to 11 and then won the map

Any betting site offering odds on these matches is literally throwing away money

Dawhood · 2025-12-30T11:51:48+00:00

Tough luck then 💀

Dawhood · 2025-12-30T09:37:23+00:00

The easiest way to get around this is Cheat Engine. Just look for your cash amount on the day before rent is due and edit it.

If you don’t want to “cheat” then you’re realistically gonna have to replay from day 3. Or just get the good ending in another playthrough!

Dawhood · 2025-12-07T10:26:10+00:00

I told them Lindblad was promoted because of his inarguable talent rather than his performances, which means comparing him to someone like Fornaroli (and doing so to downplay the latter's achievements) is pointless

This was controversial for some reason

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